I’ve written a response on this issue here:
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/campaign/2011/05/effectiveness-speed-cameras-numbers-show.html

Best,
Matt

I note that the chief non-job holder of the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance has posted another fine example of smokescreen politics on the TPA site.

What Sinclair does not explain – because he can’t stand up his analysis – is that the TPA idea of “speed cameras cause accidents” hinges on *all* cameras appearing at once in the early 90s. They didn’t: most appeared after 2000. That followed from the “Tomorrow’s roads – safer for everyone” white paper.

Sinclair is now explaining away the trend line in the TPA report by saying “Of course, at some point, improvement was going to slow and then stop”, but that isn’t even hinted at in the report.

The TPA report is doubly dishonest, but Sinclair hasn’t got the honesty or the integrity to come clean and admit it, so in defiance of Healey’s dictum he continues to dig himself and his fellow non-job holders in a bit deeper.

And then he signs off with this superb piece of meaningless drivel: “We got better results before with a more balanced approach”. Like what? And justified with what evidence?

And where’s that silent majority when you need it?

Ditto to Tim Fenton’s post above. Speed cameras clearly didn’t really take off in any numbers until the very late 90s/early 00s.

Plus the trend line the TPA want to pick out clearly continues until 1996 at least.

And adding a red horizontal line to such a graph is so poor its beyond believe. It creates an optical illusion that makes your eye just accept it as portrayed. Then again, I suppose the sheep who follow the TPA would also believe that in this link the lines not only are truly bent, but also that Gordon Brown did it. With our hard earned pennies. What an arse. http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/geom_KitaokaBulge/index.html

What an outrageous bag of shit.

The reduction in road deaths during the 80s was largely the result of a series of one-off changes in the law: front seat belts becoming compulsory in 83, fitting of rear seat belts in new cars becoming compulsory in 87, and wearing rear seat belts becoming compulsory for children in 89 and adults in 91. There is *no earthly reason* to think we could or would have maintained that trend if speed cameras hadn’t been introduced; though one thing that graph makes very clear is that when speed cameras were rolled out from around 2000 onwards, we saw a sustained rate of reduction in the number of road deaths very close to the 83-91 rate.

And people have died because this flim-flam got taken seriously.

The Taxpayers Alliance are implicated in raising death rates on the roads!

I knew they were rotten, but this proves them to be a bunch of immoral scumbags.

Now lets take this example and apply it to their utterly witless financial reports which are doing untold damage to the UK’s economy..

Compulsory seat belt laws helps to prevent injuries and death of those traveling in cars. However, the “Peltzman effect” means pedestrians are more likely to be killed because drivers feel safer so drive faster. It has been known for thirty five years that car drivers trade-off the increase in safety from seat belts to driving faster and more aggressively. As Tim Harford says a car driver with a cheese wire seat belt will drive different to one with a regular seat belt. It is all about incentives and the incentives from seat belts is to drive faster.

http://timharford.com/2006/02/driven-to-destruction/

@ Richard W:

“Compulsory seat belt laws helps to prevent injuries and death of those traveling in cars. However, the “Peltzman effect” means pedestrians are more likely to be killed because drivers feel safer so drive faster. It has been known for thirty five years that car drivers trade-off the increase in safety from seat belts to driving faster and more aggressively. As Tim Harford says a car driver with a cheese wire seat belt will drive different to one with a regular seat belt. It is all about incentives and the incentives from seat belts is to drive faster.”

Sure. Still, the statistics seem to show that the overall effect of making seatbelts compulsory in the 80s was to reduce the number of road deaths (even if the effect was not as large as it would have been but for that quirk of human psychology).

The real moral of the story, I think, is that as cars get safer from their drivers’ point of view, we are going to need to provide additional ‘outside’ incentives if we don’t want to let them compensate by driving more dangerously: speed cameras bring a successful example of one such incentive.

There is little doubt in my mind that speed cameras save lives, and no doubt at all in my mind that the TPA is a rabid organisation that will sell any lie they can think of in the name of cutting tax. However, this video is nonsense.

You could claim any negative projection will ultimately hit (and pass) zero if you extend it far enough. That doesn’t make the projection wrong. It would be just as easy to say that, if you claim that getting rid of speed cameras will make deaths go up, then by year 20XX the lack of speed cameras would have caused the deaths of more people than exist on the planet.

It’s possible that the video is supposed to satirise the TPA’s clumsily simplistic use of data, and if so, fair enough, but it’s really not made clear.

TPA deserve litigation for the deaths their self interested campaign has resulted in – their may be a criminal accessory role too.

Mathew Sinclair’s first point in his repudiation is laughable as orgs like Safe speed have been using small samples for years to justify their points of view. I am busy so I need a little more time for the rest

Sinclair is an ideologue who thinks pedestrians and cyclists get run over and killed due to their own ignorance, this making fast driving acceptable. Funny that since serious RTAs are a huge drain on the public purse, each costing millions.

He is also a global warming denier, not a proud label when in comes to data analysis